Wednesday, May 10, 2017

When Caring for Your Students Becomes Dangerous

A few weeks ago, I binge-listened to the podcast “S-Town.” Fascinating stuff. Much like the early work of The Simpsons, it’s three stories packed
like Russian nesting dolls. Just when you
think you’ve reached the resolution of one, another emerges. I don’t want to reveal too much, so this
set-up will necessarily be a bit vague.

In the third act, the narrator suggests that the central
character tried to save his quasi-protégé but may have realized too late that he
lacked the skill to do so. In trying, he
sacrificed himself. I could not help
identifying with him and was transported back to my days in the classroom.

I tell people I got into teaching
because I have a pathological need to feel important.Following my first year in the profession, I
was three days into summer vacation and realized that no one needed me for the
next two months. This led to morbid fantasies where I died in my home and no
one discovered my body until the neighbors complained about the smell. I need
to be needed.

April needed me.

At this
time, it was unusual to have electronic contact with students. Facebook and Twitter were still a few years
off, and Canvass and Google classroom were mere glints in some software
engineer’s eye. I posted my students’
homework and other resources on a free online service for teachers and encouraged
students to e-mail with questions about writing assignments or homework. What I
didn’t realize was that my responses were not filtered through the site; they
came straight from my home e-mail account. Once in possession of my home e-mail
address, April began IMing me.

If I’m being completely honest, I
was flattered. I had no personal life to speak of, so I was grateful to have
someone to “talk” to in the evenings. It started out with the usual teenage
troubles: school is stressing me out, mom doesn’t understand me, mom and dad
fight all the time. I know what it’s like to have warring parents, so I was a
sympathetic ear. I tried very hard to assure her that, although it might seem
otherwise, her parents loved her more than they loved themselves and certainly,
by all accounts, more than they loved each other. Sometimes, she would keep me
online for upwards of an hour and a half. That began to weary me, but I
couldn’t bring myself to say anything. I didn’t want her to view me as yetanother
adult who had abrogated her responsibilities to care for and protect her.

Several years earlier, a nice young
man in one of my junior classes had turned up truant several days in a row. On
the fourth day, I called his mother who apologized for his absence that day. I
innocently asked, “Okay, so you know he’s been out every day this week?”

Silence.

“I take you didn’t know that.”

“I’ve been out of town."

“Oh.”

She asked rhetorically, “What has
he been doing all this time?” and I heard the tremor in her voice that signaled
the onset of tears. “I don’t know what to do with him. What do I do with him?”

“Look, if I knew . . . this is
reason #18 I don’t have kids of my own.” She sniffed at my weak attempt at
humor—the one I used every time I
talked to the parent of a teenager doing the inexplicable things teenagers do.
“Let me make some calls and see what I can do. I’ll call you back as soon as I
know something.”

“Thanks, Deb.” I became addicted to
hearing that phrase.

Eventually, the kid went into
counseling.His mom called to tell me,
“He just stayed in his room the whole time he was absent. He wanted to kill
himself. I don’t know how I can thank you for letting me know about all this.”

“Well, if I’m ever fired, can I
count on you to organize the candlelight vigil?”

This time, her laughter was real.

Unfortunately, instead of immediately
putting April in the hands of people who were trained to handle these
situations, as I did with Evan, I overreached and tried to do it myself. Too
late, I realized I completely out of my depth, and, even then, I persisted. I
wanted to be the one to save her.

Only when her demands on my time
became intrusive did I finally ask April if I could talk to one of the school’s
social workers about her. She agreed.

Things got better for a while, and
then one day she skipped math to come to my office, explaining that she
couldn’t face going to class, that she felt like she wanted to jump out of her
skin. I was no stranger to panic attacks
and suggested she was experiencing one and that she should see a doctor.

That night, April was admitted for
in-patient treatment at a mental health facility. Thus began a descent that
seemed to have no bottom. She developed anorexia and began self-mutilating. She
was medicated with anti-depressants, anti-anxieties, anti-psychotics, anti-bipolars.
She spent months in treatment facilities. Each time she was admitted, she
fought to get released, and each time she was released she longed to go back.

This went on for the rest of her
junior year, her senior year, her freshman year in college. Even after I moved
away to attend graduate school, I would periodically receive e-mails and
letters from her, each a catalogue of the most recent horrors. With time and distance, I began to recognize
my own culpability in her illness.Riddled with guilt, I apologized to her for not getting her in touch
with professionals earlier.

She credits me with saving her
life.I remain unconvinced.Hubris masquerading as altruism is perhaps the
most insidious form of narcissism.

Dr. James Comer of Yale University
is famous for his assertion that no great learning can take place in the
absence of a great relationship.Teacher
preparation programs admonish their candidates to teach the whole child.Even the bumper sticker and t-shirt
industries proclaim that we don’t teach [insert subject matter here], we teach
children.What this means in real life is
that effective teachers cannot remain ignorant of their students’ lives outside
the classroom.Knowing the context or
cause of a child’s behavior allows you to respond to it more effectively.

The problem is that, once you know,
you can never not know.And the people who become teachers tend to be
people who want to fix problems.I mean,
it’s not called a “helping profession” for nothing.

The tricky part is determining
where the boundary between commitment and overreach lies.I used to be the announcer for our school’s
wrestling matches and would attend the “coaches’ meeting” at the local pub afterward.Over a beer, one of my students’ fathers
tried to ingratiate himself with me by bemoaning what a lazy student his son
was.I couldn’t resist correcting him:
“He’s a good kid.He’s really smart.”
Pause.“You know, he thinks you hate
him.”

The father seemed shocked, as any
decent part would be.“No, he doesn’t.”

I shrugged, “That’s what he told
me.”

Did my action help?I have no idea.Was it appropriate?Probably not.I saw an opportunity to give this kid a voice and jumped at it.If the guy wouldn’t listen to his son, maybe
he’d listen to the teacher he was hitting on.

A legislator or central office
administrator reading this might attempt to “solve” the boundary problem by
creating a zero-tolerance policy for parent-teacher and student-teacher
interactions outside of school.Such a
policy is absolutely untenable.Even if
you forego the bar, you’ll run into your kids and their families at the grocery
store, at the burger joint, in the locker room at the gym.Some teachers are related to the parents of
their students or sing in the same church choir.Teachers cannot simultaneously remain aloof
and get actively involved.

So, again, where do you draw the
line?While others may reject my answer
as irresponsible or unenforceable, I think the rightness or wrongness of your
behavior lies in its motivation.If your
endgame is the acquisition of gratitude and love from your students or their
parents, you have crossed over to the dark side.

Unfortunately, as in my case, it may only be
in retrospect that you recognize your error.